"You know that year you're currently serving? Add twenty-five, and choke on it."

Detective Elliot Stabler of Manhattan’s Special Victims Unit is the kind of guy you love to have on your side. The badass ex-Marine could just have easily been a hardcore insane sociopath as a police officer, but luckily he decided to harness his getting-pissed powers for good. Now his idea of a perfect afternoon revolves around tackling wife abusers, swearing at child pornographers, and smashing Bill Goldberg in the back of the head with a fire extinguisher.

The thing about Elliot is that he spends all day dealing with the worst kind of bastard criminals – pedophiles, rapists, murders, child molesters – and he seems to take everything personally. He’s super intense, and doesn’t fuck around for a second when it comes to taking some jackass d-bag kidnapper, shooting him in the shoulder, face-planting him into the asphalt and shipping him off to Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison. His anger management issues make him that much more dangerous, because you just never know when he’s going to fucking flip out, bar the doors of the interrogation room and go all CIA on a suspect’s ass to get a confession. And when it comes to the good cop, bad cop stuff, he’s ALWAYS the bad cop. He fucking just leans up against the wall, only speaks to insult the suspects, and shows them nothing but the utter contempt that they deserve at all times. Usually those fuckers sing like birds to Detective Benson simply because they’re terrified of being left alone in a room with this dude. And it’s not just idle talk either - he just completely flips his lid like a ninja sometimes and beat the ever-loving shit out of these scumbag criminals, because nobody fucking comes between Elliot Stabler and his righteous quest to put dirtball molesters behind bars. He’s good at it too – that one time that he was being sued for some “excessive force” bullshit, the assistant district attorney mentioned that he has something like a 97 percent closure rate on all of his cases. As a reference point, most people don’t have a ninety-seven percent closure rate when it comes to tying their fucking shoes. Also, if I had to guess, the three percent failure rate probably all stems from confessions that Elliot beat out of suspects and which were thrown out in court.

Now the ultimate duality of Elliot Stabler is that he’s also great at dealing with the victims of these horrible crimes. You’d think that he was all about shooting perverts in the balls and bodyslamming perps through coffee tables, and that he couldn’t possibly be a warm and understanding individual, but when it’s time to get the victim’s side of the story Elliot shows compassion for their plight and always makes them feel comfortable enough to open up and give him some clues and shit. You see him deal with these people and you’re all thinking to yourself, “wow, Elliot is really just a nice guy,” and then two minutes later he’s clubbing a rapist over the head with a fireplace poker and throwing him off a fire escape into a dumpster.

You can’t stop this guy either. He’s been shot, stabbed, poisoned, blown up, thrown through plate glass windows and punched in the face countless times, but his reaction is always the same – he shows no pain, dusts himself off, refuses medical treatment, and gets right back to fucking work. He’ll be bleeding out of ten places on his body, sitting at his desk filling out paperwork while everyone looks at him like he’s nuts. One time some jackass teenager stabbed him in the chest with a pen, and his first response was to get pissed and jack the kid right in the fucking mouth. The same can be said for his work ethic… once Elliot’s on the case, he refuses to back down for any reason, even when his own Captain is like, “goddamn it Elliot I’m ordering you to back down!”. If he has to “bend the rules” or “violate your human rights” a little bit to get some vital evidence to solve a rape or find a missing kid, he won’t even hesitate to go that extra mile. When he’s interrogating someone and they try to fuck with him, he smolders with rage and intimidates the hell out of them until they crack like a fucking egg. Stonewalling him only makes him even more pissed off.

Now a good detective is only as good the men and women who are watching his back, and it doesn’t get much better than SVU. He’s got a hot babe, a creepy conspiracy theorist, and IceMothafuckin’ T. I mean holy shit, I think I’d have a good chance of taking down Godzilla in an illegal Russian underground slap-fight if I knew Ice-T was backing my shit up.

Speaking of his squad, Elliot fills another interesting role in that he provides help to the younger officer when they need it, and is always willing to help out with other detectives’ investigations when they run out of leads and shit. It’s not too often that you see the “loose cannon” also function as the “wise veteran”, but Elliot Stabler apparently doesn’t subscribe to your bullshit archetypes. He does whatever he wants, whenever he wants, to whomever he wants, at all times. He’s a badass, tough cop who takes no bullshit, confronts the worst criminal elements our society has to offer, and pummels the living fuck out of them.